No. The federation model of the SKS pool has various problems in terms
of reliability, abuse-resistance, privacy, and usability. We might do
something similar to it, but keys.openpgp.org
will never be part of the SKS pool itself.

For the moment, no.
We do plan to decentralize keys.openpgp.org
at some point.
With multiple servers
run by independent operators,
we can hopefully improve the reliability
of this service even further.

Several folks offered to help out
by "running a Hagrid server instance".
We very much appreciate the offer,
but we will probably never have an "open" federation model like SKS,
where everyone can run an instance and become part of a "pool".
This is for two reasons:

Federation with open participation requires all data to be public.
This significantly impacts the privacy of our users, because it
allows anyone to scrape a list of all email addresses.

Servers run as a hobby by casual administrators do not meet our
standards for reliability and performance.

An email address can only be associated with a single key.
When an address is verified for a new key,
it will no longer appear in any key
for which it was previously verified.
Non-identity information will still be distributed
for all keys.

This means a search by email address
will only return a single key,
not multiple candidates.
This eliminates an impossible choice for the user
("Which key is the right one?"),
and makes key discovery by email much more convenient.

We use a modern standard called
MTA-STS,
combined with
STARTTLS Everywhere
by the EFF,
to make sure verification emails are sent out securely.
This protects against eavesdropping and interception during delivery.

The MTA-STS mechanism only works if supported by the recipient's email
provider. Otherwise, emails will be delivered as usual.
You can run this test
to see if your email provider supports it.
If the "MTA-STS" entry on the left isn't a green checkmark,
please ask your provider to update their configuration.

A "third party signature" is a signature on a key
that was made by some other key.
Most commonly,
those are the signatures produced when "signing someone's key",
which are the basis for
the "Web of Trust".
For a number of reasons,
those signatures are not currently distributed
via keys.openpgp.org.

The killer reason is spam.
Third party signatures allow attaching arbitrary data to anyone's key,
and nothing stops a malicious user from
attaching so many megabytes of bloat to a key
that it becomes practically unusable.
Even worse,
they could attach offensive or illegal content.

There are ideas to resolve this issue.
For example, signatures could be distributed with the signer,
rather than the signee.
Alternatively, we could require
cross-signing by the signee before distribution
to support a
caff-style
workflow.
If there is enough interest,
we are open to working with other OpenPGP projects
on a solution.

The keys.openpgp.org service is meant for key
distribution and discovery, not as a de facto certification authority.
Client implementations that want to offer verified communication should
rely on their own trust model.

When an OpenPGP key marks one of its identities as revoked, this
identity should no longer be considered valid for the key, and this
information should ideally be distributed to all OpenPGP clients that
already know about the newly revoked identity.

Unfortunately, there is currently no good way to distribute revocations,
that doesn't also reveal the revoked identity itself. We don't want to
distribute revoked identities, so we can't distribute the identity at
all.

There are proposed solutions to this issue, that allow the distribution
of revocations without also revealing the identity itself. But so far
there is no final specification, or support in any OpenPGP software. We
hope that a solution will be established in the near future, and will
add support on keys.openpgp.org as soon as
we can.

Some keyservers support search for keys by part of an email address.
This allows discovery not only of keys, but also of addresses, with a query like "keys for addresses at gmail dot com".
This effectively puts the addresses of all keys on those keyservers into a public listing.

A search by email address on keys.openpgp.org returns a key only if it exactly matches the email address.
That way, a normal user can discover the key associated with any address they already know, but they cannot discover any new email addresses.
This prevents a malicious user or spammer from easily obtaining a list of all email addresses on the server.

We made this restriction a part of our privacy policy,
which means we can't change it without asking for user consent.